"Among the young there’s a strong investment in believing that no one has ever walked the paths they’re walking — just as among the old there’s an equally strong investment in believing that there’s nothing new under the sun."

…

"So good for Oliver Sacks, not only that he’s still thinking vigorously and writing well at 80, but that people are listening. But how many other sources of expertise and wisdom — perhaps uniquely valuable and otherwise inaccessible expertise and wisdom — are we ignoring because they’re old? Who is still out there with something to say that we need to hear, and could hear if we took the trouble? In whatever field of inquiry we care about, we need to seek them out and find them and pay attention to them — before it’s too late."

"And it’s not just in music and movies that artists steal from other artists. It’s already happened in design during the war of smartphones. What did Apple steal from Samsung and what did Samsung steal from Apple? If we’re ever going to stop clogging up our legal pipes with endless patent lawsuits, Ferguson says we have to accept the ugly truth that creativity is stealing."

"Henry Luce’s Time started as a full-fledged aggregator almost 89 years ago.

A quick visit to the library confirmed his statements. Sure enough, all 29 pages of the black and white weekly — its signature red-border cover not yet developed — were packed with advertisements and aggregation. This wasn’t just rewrites of the week’s news; it was rip-and-read copy from the day’s major publications — The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York World, to name a few."

"Because new-market disruptions initially attract those that aren’t traditional consumers of The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, these incumbent organizations feel little pain or threat. So they stay the course on content, competing on “quality” against these new-market disruptors."

"We’ve been here before. The question is not, how aggregation is ruining journalism, but how traditional journalism will respond to the aggregation."